If I'm using it from the web UI, this is exactly what I would want—this allows the language model to define the output language so I get correct syntax highlighting, without an error-prone secondary step of language detection.

If I'm using it from the API, then all I have to do is strip out the leading backticks and language name if I don't need to check the language, or alternatively parse it to determine what the output language is.

It seems to me that in either case this is actually strictly better, and annotating the computer programming language used doesn't feel to me like extra text—I would think of that requirement as prohibiting a plaintext explanation before or after the code.

It is still ignoring an explicit requirement, which is almost always bad. The user should be able to override what the creator/application thinks is 'strictly better'. Exceptions probably exist, but this isn't one of them.

Like I said, I read their requirement differently—the phrase they use is "the code only".

I don't think that including backticks is a violation of this requirement. It's still readily parseable and serves as metadata for interpreting the code. In the context of ChatGPT, which typically will provide a full explanation for the code snippet, I think this is a reasonable interpretation of the instruction.

I understand your point better now. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, because code + metadata is still not "the code only", but it's not a totally unreasonable interpretation of the phrase.

This sounds a lot like a disagreement over product decisions that the development team has made, and not at all what people normally think when you say "a new paper has proved GPT-4 is getting worse over time."

> what people normally think

While we're doing Keynesian beauty contests, I think that 98% of the time when people say that a product is getting worse over time, they're referring to product decisions the development team has made, and how they have been implemented.